Blue Static

Bugdar

The free, fast, and powerful bug tracker just took another large leap in terms of features and speed. Bugdar 1.2 hosts a series of new features, bug fixes, speed enhancements, and minor tinkerings.

Enhanced Searching

The search feature in Bugdar 1.2 has been greatly enhanced with features such as XML export, saved searches, and mass-updates. With the XML export feature, search results can be downloaded and saved as an XML file for later processing, which is helpful for importing into an external reporting application such as Microsoft Excel. Saved searches enable your users to remember commonly-used search queries and rerun them at their convenience and need. Finally, mass-updates allow developers to perform a search and then update all the bugs in the result set at once.

Pluggable Authentication

For most administrators, Bugdar is just a small part of an overarching system. Many of these systems are have pre-existing user databases, and previously, these other databases could not be used with Bugdar without a significant amount of work. With 1.2, however, an Authentication API was created to allow administrators to customize the way Bugdar authenticates users. Bugdar now comes with a Drupal, phpBB2, and vBulletin 3 authentication module to allow administrators to use those existing user databases. Of course, the default authentication system is to have Bugdar maintain its own user database.

Custom Column Ordering

Users can now control which columns they want to see on bug grids. The order in which columns are displayed, along with which columns, can now be controlled from a user's control panel as well as the administrative control panel. Data columns can be combined into a single display column, allowing for instance, Status and Resolution to be displayed together, or they can be separated out into individual columns. This adjustability allows users and developers alike to see the information they need.

Multiple Usergroups

In Bugdar 1.2, users can now be part of more than one usergroup. This extends the already flexible permissions system to make the job of administrators easier by allowing them to create fewer usergroups, and instead simply assigning a user to multiple groups.

Template Optimization

Using a caching system, the file system templates now reside in a pre-parsed and cached form inside the database. However, editing templates is still done through the files, and whenever Bugdar detects that a template has been changed, it re-caches it. This new caching mechanism in Bugdar 1.2 decreases Bugdar's loading times by over a full second, bringing the average load time for a Bugdar page to be less than 0.3 seconds.